Kuroki

Thanks for the answers all, I think I understand both the situation in KSP and during Apollo 11 and onwards much better now. The thread kind of meandered off in to orbital physics which is only tangentially relevant, but I'll never say no to some orbital physics talk I'll quickly summarise my thoughts using this handy post from the thread: 1) True, but multiple round-trip landings are much worse than rovers, and usually a short biome hop is more efficient if your landing site is well picked. (I don't do that either and limit myself to one biome worth of science per celestial body to stretch career mode out a bit anyway.) 2) Yes, but you're still carting around the weight of the equipment itself, not just the resources. The life support mods I've tried don't model this all that well and seem to assume the command pod weights include the various pumps and other necessary equipment. 3) Heat shielding? Yeah, this is a big one and I'd leave my heat shielding with the mothership. In the real world this probably wouldn't work too well... 4) Wouldn't a 30 part limit preclude landers? 1) Definitely too heavy. Especially as size increases. 2) I tend to do this so I'm probably a bit biased against them anyway. 3) Cubic octagonal struts are pretty light and sturdy 4) Yep 5) RCS is a waste for anything not docking in my experience. I leave RCS and docking responsibility up to the mothership. Obviously not applicable to the real world... 6) I've had some good results with ants. This is all true, but Tom Hanks taught me that redundancy only gets you so far

Hi ferram and everyone else helping with FAR, sorry to interrupt the ongoing conversation, I just wanted to say thank you for the fantastic work on this mod. FAR is why I keep playing KSP, and I'm so impressed by the creativity and skill that has gone in to it. Thank you very much for making the transition from flying in DCS to flying in KSP less of a shock to the system.

This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks! Lots of people pointed towards this answer, but the detailed explanation and maths on that link answer my question perfectly. So it is usually not worthwhile to have a lander in an efficient KSP design, but is in the real world depending on circumstances. This is also very true, and these days I prefer pretty rockets over ultra-efficient ones. I'm still not sure the real Apollo missions wouldn't have been more efficient by cutting the LM and leaving the SM with return fuel and heat shielding in orbit, but I can see the advantage of the LM over just landing the whole CSM now.

Thanks for the answers guys. I can understand this, and you're probably right, but at the very least couldn't you skip the extra pod with its avionics, life support, docking equipment, etc. and just leave the extra fuel in orbit? I wonder if there's a text version, sounds interesting

Last night I decided I'd try out an Apollo-style Mun landing, complete with CSM and LM and I pulled it off (yay!) but it got me thinking. My craft would have been much more efficient if I'd skipped the LM entirely and slapped some landing legs on the CSM. I would have left less fuel behind on the Mun in the landing stage of the LM and wouldn't have been carting around a redundant lander can mk.2 and set of engines, let alone docking ports and stability struts. It seems that having a separate lander is only more efficient for interplanetary trips, and even then only to leave the main drive in orbit without redundant crew pods etc. Am I missing something aside from extra crew safety that makes the separate lander worth the extra delta-V? On a side note, does anyone know the reasoning behind why NASA went with the LM instead of a landing CSM? Google doesn't tell me much on the why front... Also, hi! New to the forums

The very low-tech option is to put just enough SRBs on your lander to reach an apoapsis of about 15km on Kerbin and launch vertically. Once your vertical velocity zeroes out at AP stage your lander normally. This should give you results within ~10% for ISP.